Lukács, György

György/Georg Lukács (1885–1971) was a Hungarian philosopher, one of the leading theorists of Western Marxism. Born in 1885 Budapest, he spent long stretches before and during World War I in Heidelberg, Germany, on the fringes of Max Weber's intellectual circle. Lukács returned to Hungary in 1917 and joined the newly formed Communist Party in 1918. In 1919, he became responsible for cultural affairs during the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic. After the collapse of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, he emigrated to Vienna, Berlin, and after 1933 to Moscow. Following the sharp condemnation of his theoretical and political views by the Comintern in 1928, he completely withdrew from direct political activity. He returned to Hungary in 1945, but with the consolidation of the Stalinist regime there, he was again forced from public life.

During the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, he was nominated minister of culture in the government of Imre Nagy. Following the Soviet intervention, he was first interned in Romania, then under the condition of “internal emigration” in Budapest. He died in 1971.

Lukács's volume of essays, History and Class Consciousness (1923), was the founding text of a new interpretation of the meaning of the Marxian legacy, usually referred to as “Western” Marxism. In it he radically criticised the positivist-scientistic interpretation of Marx's theory, prevalent both in the 2nd and the 3rd Internationale. Marxism, for Lukács, offered a solution to the unresolved dilemmas of the Enlightenment and German Classical Idealism, dilemmas that were ultimately rooted in the internal contradictions of bourgeois society. These seemingly abstract speculative difficulties cannot be solved in theory alone, but must be overcome in a practice that radically transcends the horizon of this society. Marxism is the theory of the revolutionary praxis of the proletariat that can abolish its situation as a dominated and exploited class only by abolishing the reified logic of historical development that had reached its culmination in capitalism. Under conditions of reification, individuals and their collectivities become dependent objects of the power of those very social conditions and institutions that they themselves have created in their social—but not collectively organised—activities. Their fate is determined by the laws of separated institutional spheres—first of all the laws of the market, over which they have no control. Overcoming such a situation of reification requires the development of an adequate (“imputed”) class consciousness This class consciousness cannot be the mere reflex, or the simple recognition of the economic interests, of the working class. It can only develop in a progressive fusion of the material practice of class struggle and revolutionary theory.

Lukács's pre-Marxist works dealt almost exclusively with problems of literature and aesthetics. He treated, however, the problems of artistic modernity in the context of a broadly conceived cultural crisis. Modernity dissolved any shared framework of a common culture, able to orient the everyday life of the individuals. As such, it was impossible for individuals to endow their life with stable, unique meanings and to achieve genuine mutual understanding. At the same time, in his works of this period—primarily in The History of the Development of the Modern Drama (1911) and in The Theory of the Novel (1916), he gave new direction to the sociology of literature. He emphasised that the social-historical significance of a work is not primarily located in its explicit or implicit “message,” in its meaningcontent, but in its form, in the way that it creates this meaning. In the later book, he disclosed the historical grounds and significance of the shift from the classical epic to the novel as the leading genre of a “world abandoned by God.” He also followed up the fundamental generic transformation [Page 459]of the novel form from Cervantes to Dostoyevski as aesthetic solutions to the ever more tragic quest of its hero, the “problematic individual” who is in search of a meaning for his or her own life.

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